


You Never Forget Your First

by cardassianfamilyvalues



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Dystopia, Gen, Police Brutality
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-24
Updated: 2019-07-24
Packaged: 2020-07-12 17:08:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19949812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cardassianfamilyvalues/pseuds/cardassianfamilyvalues
Summary: When you live in an interstellar sci-fi dystopia, you have to get used to interrogations being a normal part of life. This is how some of Blake's people had their first experiences with interrogation.





	1. Vila

The wife grabbed him by the ear and shrieked, “Did you take my earrings?! Did you?!”

“Look here, Larna,” the husband said. “You can't take it personal. He doesn't know better. How could he?"

Vila wriggled and thrashed, as the old lady’s fingernails dug into his earlobe, like a bee sting that just wouldn’t end. “AH!” she screamed, after he bit down as hard as he could on her other hand. She cast her hand out to grab him again but he had already dashed halfway across the room by the time she realized where he’d gone.

The wife cast herself dramatically down on the bed. “Oh, Tekker—I thought I’d be a good citizen, a good woman, and take in a needy orphan and show him a loving, Alpha home. But it’s just too hard,” she said, breaking into tears, “it’s just too hard!”

“Steady on, Larna,” the man said, stroking her back. “We’ll find him a place at the children’s home. They’re good people, professionals, they know how to deal with this sort of thing.”

Children’s home. The phrase grabbed Vila’s stomach by the throat (as his auntie used to say). He knew what that meant. That really meant hostel, which really just meant prison.

Maybe if he hadn’t played the fool for that lady that day, putting on his sweetest, most harmless smile, maybe if he’d just been able to bear it on the streets for one more day he would still be free now—free of money and food and clothes, to be sure, but still free. 

Maybe he would have gotten picked up and taken to hostel anyway, but then again, maybe not. What was certain is that the week and a half of good food and clean clothes and trips to the All-Federation Planetarium was not worth this new development.

And, if he were fully honest with himself, it hadn’t been just a scheme. He had really liked the lady at first, she had a nice smile and those pretty furs and had seemed to genuinely care for him. And the man was so clean and his clothes so neatly creased, not like the ragged, drunken bums Vila was used to.

Well, that’s what you get for trusting Alphas. Stupid, stupid, naïve, Vila. He should have listened to Yakar. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Well, it had been worth a try, Vila told himself. You never try, you never know.

The man stood up and grabbed Vila by the wrists, and this time the grip was far too strict to wriggle out of. “Come on, young man. We’re going to take you where you belong.”


	2. Cally

She could hear the crude, rough noises coming out of the mouths of the officers, but she couldn’t filter them into words. Not just the weedy, snarling one in front of her, but that of the beefy, shouty one in the next cell over, nor that of the surly, sarcastic one across the hall, and the harsh words of all the guards across the prison interrogating her sisters, wafting through her head, along with the fear and the disgust and the defiance of her sisters.

Cally couldn’t imagine how anyone could be that way, to talk like that to another sentient. What could possibly go on inside their heads? How could they justify the way they behaved, brutalizing the living beings in front of them, for a sick and twisted empire?

Cally sat up straight and closed her eyes. She drew strength from her sisters and they drew strength from her, and slowly her disgust purified itself into something more stable and less draining, a determination, a certainty, a dignity. She wouldn’t bother trying to figure out what they had to say, because she certainly had nothing to say back to them. She would follow her code, in pursuit of her just cause, and any pain she felt today would mean nothing, because someday all the prison walls would crumble.


	3. Tarrant

“ _Where_ did you get the dope?” He slammed his palm down on the table.

The perp stared back at him dully, bored, was it—contemptuous, almost?

Tarrant fought the urge to rub his hand. He hadn’t realized how painful it would be to slap your palm flat down on a table. It was an unnatural thing to do with your hand, really. Easier to bang a fist, probably. He’d have to remember that, for the future.

“Dope got to your vocal cords, huh?” his partner said. Mesk Belnar. Tarrant didn’t know him terribly well, but they’d sat next to each other in Law 513 last year and sometimes shared a crib sheet. Sometimes they’d get to talking after class and Belnar would always have funny stories about his family out in the Hevelar colony. He was training to become a colonial policeman and had been assigned to teach Tarrant the basics of police work, to get some of the practicals hours he needed to become an officer.

Tarrant had certainly never seen Belnar’s face turn this particular shade of red, nor his eyes flash with this particular dangerous glint. The perp, on the other hand, continued to sit there dully. He had a low forehead, big lips, a craggy face, and in general the classic visage of a degenerate.

“Look here, scum,” Belnar said. “My buddy here, it’s his first day, he’s still a bit of a softie. Me, I have no compunctions about giving you the old third degree. None at all.”

His first day it might be, but Tarrant couldn’t help thinking that the good cop / bad cop shtick was a little played out. Apparently the perp thought so too, because he continued staring blankly. Or maybe he just didn’t know what “compunctions” meant.

“Right, that’s about enough of this,” Belnar said. “I’ve got about a dozen more of these to get through before lunch break. Tarrant, grab his hair and pull his head back for me, there’s a good lad.”

Tarrant got up from the table and yanked the perp’s head back. The man tried to duck away, but with his hands chained to the table there was nothing much he could do. 

Tarrant had expected Belnar to hit him just once—and wasn’t it a bit early for all this? weren’t they supposed to exhaust the verbal and the psychological methods first?—but not to sock him once, twice, three times in the nose and the mouth, then to punch him in the stomach and knock him in the head again and again until that dull face was a bloody, battered mess and the silent man was screaming and shrieking in a way Tarrant hadn’t realized a grown man could sound. Tarrant had felt so unsettled and irritated by the man’s defiant mien, a minute ago he would have said yeah, sure, I’d love to see someone knock that smirk off his face, but now he felt a sort of loss and vicarious shame at seeing the man reduced to animal instinct, thrashing and crying.

He let the man go, and Belnar swung at him once more and hit air, not realizing Tarrant was no longer holding his head back and the man could duck. For a split second he looked embarrassed and then shot Tarrant a highly suspicious look. Then, recovering, he said, “Anything you want to share with us now?”

“I got it—I got the dope off of Old Man Valken,” the man gasped, blood spewing from his lip as he spoke. “He runs all the dope rings ‘round here.”

“There, that wasn’t so hard, was it? I hope next time you won’t make things so hard on yourself, eh? Tarrant?”

Tarrant started and began uncuffing the man from the table and re-cuffing his wrists behind his back. As they marched him back to his cell Tarrant felt a definite sick feeling in his stomach. It was a sort of shock of nausea that tended to descend upon him and depart just as fast, whenever he saw something he couldn’t quite reconcile to his image of what it meant to be a Federation officer.

But maybe, he thought, one of these days he just might manage to throw up, and once he did he might be a different person.


End file.
